`FOR GOD AND COUNTRY' CUTS TO THE CORE OF ARMY-LIFE TEDIUM

Michael Wilmington, Tribune movie criticCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The unusual and very good "For God and Country," opening for a week at Facets Multimedia, is a semi-autobiographical film about an 18-year-old Austrian army conscript and his military service near the Austrian-Hungarian border in 1980. Unlike countless American movies that use similar situations for slapstick and bombast--or preaching and sarcasm--this movie tells its story with wit, realism and visual beauty. It shows military service as many conscripts experience it: a barrage of tedium, less gung-ho than ho-hum.

Because no war is going on, and none is likely, the army tenure of the movie's main character, Pvt. Berger (Christoph Dostal), is a season of boredom and absurdity, punctuated by sex, high jinks, an accidental death and some visits back home to his father's movie house. Meanwhile, his bellicose instructors try to turn their charges into platoon leaders, filling their days with bed inspections and frequent humiliation.

"God and Country" may be about boredom, but it's rarely boring to watch. Writer-director Wolfgang Murnberger, who went through six months of service, is an ingenious visual stylist. He excels at conveying the stifling atmosphere, but he doesn't sermonize or bludgeon us with outrage. Nor does he paint Berger, his surrogate character, as any better than his mates or officers--save possibly for his artistic talent.

We see the inanity of Berger's army life, the pointlessness of his daily routine, the mechanical joylessness of the Saturday night blowouts. We can empathize when he escapes to his private solace: a favorite toilet stall where he sits, marks off the days of his enlistment and draws an elaborate graffiti mural, an ersatz tapestry of medieval warfare and heraldry.

Berger has another escape: dreams of medieval knight-errantry, powerfully rendered in stylized black-and-white images that knock your eyes out. In that tension between dream and reality, boredom and threat, trivial routine and grandiose fantasy, "For God and Country" lives and breathes.

Austria, described as "one of Europe's least film-minded nations" in the most recent Katz Film Encyclopedia, has been the source of some fascinating movies in recent years--particularly the chillingly precise nightmares of writer-director Michael Haneke ("71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance"). And the 34-year-old Murnberger, in this exemplary fiction feature debut, is another genuine talent: a jokester and gadfly with a cool documentarian's eye. "For God and Country," which won the Austrian Film Commission's Best Film prize for 1994, is a bright, sharp, finely crafted little film that cuts to the quick.

''FOR GOD AND COUNTRY''

(star) (star) (star)

Directed and written by Wolfgang Murnberger; photographed by Fabian Eder; edited by Maria Homolkova; art direction by Renate Martin, Andreas Donhauser; music by Robert Stiegler, Mischa Krausz; produced by Danny Krausz, Milan Dor. A Dor Film release; opens Friday at Facets Multimedia. In German with English subtitles. Running time: 1:55. No MPAA rating. Adult. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.

THE CAST

Berger....................Christoph Dostal

Rumpler.......................Andreas Lust

Moser........................Andreas Simma

Kernstock.................Marcus J. Carney

Tomschitz................Leopold Altenburg

Sgt. Pfister...............Albert Weilguny

Of all of Great Britain's great eccentric rebel filmmakers--Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger--the cheekiest may be Peter Greenaway ("The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover"). As he playfully stylizes his films, he loads them with enough shocking images to startle any bourgeois.

Greenaway's "26 Bathrooms" (1986) and "Death in the Seine" (1989)--TV works receiving their Chicago premiere for two successive weekends at Facets Video theater--show him at his most impudent. They're highly entertaining, but it's no use recommending them to the easily offended--especially "Death in the Seine," with its repeated shots crawling across nude bodies of both sexes, supposedly corpses fished from the Seine after the French Revolution.

The film, which uses sober historical accounts drawn from the reports of two mortuary attendants, shows once again Greenaway's tendency to aestheticize death and decay. The high-style collage compositions distance us from suffering. The crisp images and realistic reports pull us back.

"26 Bathrooms" has a structure that recalls Greenaway's masterly 1988 movie-game, "Drowning By Numbers." This film essay on British bathrooms and what people do in them--often, once again, in the nude--is arranged numerically and alphabetically. It's urbane and jokey, but "Death in the Seine" is the one that really stings us, with its jewel-like images of a harsh and violent world. Rating for both films: (star) (star) (star). No MPAA rating. Adult. Nudity, violence, language.